CARLISLE — Mary Deitch might have grown up in a farming community in Cumberland County, but at the time she met her future farming husband, Harry, 65 years ago, many of her hours were spent working in a Mechanicsburg clothing factory.

Harry and Mary married in 1947, and the next year, on Easter Monday, they moved onto a 128-acre farm on Kost Road.

“It was a big change,” remembers Mary Deitch, now 89.

“We started with three horses and a John Deere tractor,” she said.

She kept her job at the factory until they were able to obtain dairy cattle and machinery with which to run their farm. And once they did, Mary took on a farmer’s life alongside her husband, driving the tractor over the fields countless times, sowing and cutting the wheat into sheaves, working the ground, planting corn and raking straw and hay.

When Harry passed away in 1966, she hired a man to take over the chief operations.

Eventually, she sold her cows to an Amish man in Lancaster, and held a public sale for all of the equipment.

She continues to hang onto the precious, level and fertile farmland, now renting the land to other farmers, but she has become increasingly aware of farmland all around her being lost to developers.

“It was only a few months after [Harry] passed away, they were after me … but I just wouldn’t sell it,” she said.

A struggling economy has taken its toll on farmers, and many farm owners are looking at the money they can make by selling their land to developers.

“They can get more money by selling it than if they keep on farming,” Deitch said.

But Deitch is clear - to her, it’s not about the money.

“I just look at it this way - I don’t like to see the good farms being destroyed,” she said. “When they’re gone, you can’t bring them back.”

She knows her husband would have supported her.

“That’s the way I feel, and that’s the way I know he’d have felt,” she said.

That’s why she has worked the past 10 years, delays coming through physical ailments and meeting stringent requirements, to enter her farm into Cumberland County’s Agricultural Conservation Easement Purchase Program, which uses county funds to purchase easements on prime agricultural land from willing landowners, setting aside the property as permanently preserved farmland and forever safe from development.

Deitch said she had hoped in her lifetime she would see it saved from the fate of what she calls “concrete and macadam”.

On March 11, Deitch's farm was the first in Silver Spring Township to receive that official designation. Township and county officials plan to hold a celebration at the farm on April 6.

Mary hopes that other farm owners will be inspired by her actions to save their own land, even as she sees land right next to hers succumbing to development.

Deitch senses the timing is crucial, saying she had done what she can to hold off developers, but, “I don’t know how long it will last.”

Silver Spring Township is comprised of approximately 20,000 acres of land, with farmland representing just under 5,000 acres.

While most of the township is zoned residential, it is also diverse, consisting of farmland, shopping centers and numerous housing developments.

“We want to keep that balance — at least try to,” said Vince DiFilippo, Silver Spring Township supervisor and member of the Cumberland County Agricultural Preservation Board.

But agricultural land must remain a priority, he believes, as it helps municipalities with water recharging, storm water issues, and keeps wells pumped up without developing the whole township, he said.

Farmland helps keep a municipality’s costs down in the long term, he said, while costing the township nothing.

“There are no streets to update, no roads to maintain,” he said.

No tiling, repairing sidewalks or replacing lights. “It’s pretty much cash-free for us,” he said.

Farmland also helps the school districts, he said.

The cost to educate a student in the Cumberland Valley School District is just under $10,000, and each home in the district averages about one-half of a student, he said.

As township land is taken over by housing developments, that means more people and more students to provide for.

“Compare that to the revenue out of taxes, and you’d have a shortfall,” DiFilippo said. That shortage goes on forever, and creates more of an expense for a school as the hallways get more crowded.

In comparison, if the land is purchased instead as an easement and left open, the cost is about $4,000 to $6,000 an acre, paying for itself in two to three years, DiFilippo said.

Applications — 100 percent voluntary — for the farmland preservation program, which receives funding from county, state and federal levels, are accepted throughout the year, with Dec. 31 as the deadline to be included in the following year. Applications are ranked according to criteria including soil quality, development potential, the size of the farm, and what types of conservation practices are being used.

Deitch’s farm, according to county Farmland Preservation Program Administrator Rebecca Wiser, ranked No. 3 out of 54 farms in the county in 2012.

Five farms in the county were preserved last year, with Mary’s the first to go to settlement, she said.

The program has been in existence since the first farm was preserved in 1992. Since then, many farms in Mechanicsburg and west have been included in the program. In the most recent years, the participating farms have been further west into Carlisle and beyond. Penn Township has the most preserved farms.

Now permanently preserved in Cumberland County are 15,439 acres — approximately 10 percent of the county’s farmland.

Once designated as part of the program, the county purchases the land from the owner and owns its development rights, allowing the property owner to continue using the land for agriculture, but they will never be allowed to develop it for anything other than a farm, Wiser said.

Deitch was paid $3,675 an acre for the easement rights — much, much lower than she could have received if she sold it to a developer, Wiser said.

Many farm owners in Silver Spring Township have taken the first step in permanent preservation by joining the Agricultural Security Area program, through which the municipality designates the land as an agricultural district.

There are currently 2,100 acres under the Agricultural Security Area program, according to Silver Spring Township Manager Theresa Eberly.

DiFilippo realizes they won’t be able to preserve all of the farmland in the township.

However, “contrary to popular belief that most want to sell their land and use the money for retirement,” he said, “there are a lot of farmers who simply love their land and do not want to develop.”

That is something that township officials are hoping they will see more of.

A group of 11 concerned residents, representing a number of demographics in the township, formed this month what chairman Michael Woods terms “a full-swing political action committee” called Preserve Silver Spring.

The logo for a new local political action committee, Preserve Silver Spring.

The primary purpose of the group, said Woods, an agricultural science instructor and FFA adviser at Cumberland Valley High School, is to educate township residents and others “about the importance of proper land management and conservation of our agricultural lands and open spaces available to us.”

“A lot of people aren’t aware that the township has the most fertile land in the county,” he added.

The committee wants to hang on to it, as they realize how quickly developments can take over, such as in neighboring Hampden Township, where only three farms remain standing.

The group is aiming to have a referendum placed on the November ballot that would allow residents to decide if they would be willing to allot a portion of their taxes for the township to begin its own farmland and open space preservation program.

“It’s really scary with the vast number of people, especially young individuals, who truly don’t have a concept of where our food, fiber and natural resources come from,” Woods said, adding that with the world population expected to grow by 2 billion by 2050, if prime and fertile land continues to be developed, there won’t be enough to feed, clothe or house future generations.

DiFilippo said similar programs have become very popular in other municipalities in southeastern Pennsylvania, with funding being generated through earned income tax, property tax, or a combination of the two. The money is set aside for farmland preservation or natural and environmental areas, or additional parks and recreation.